In the ancient world – just as it still is today – commssioning one’s portrait, or that of a family member, was a way of overcoming the brevity of existence, a means to preserve the memory of an individual or family along with the set of values conveyed in such images. This drive towards eternity is documented in the many portraits in marble and stone that survive from Roman Italy.
The Greek historian Polybius, in Rome around the middle of the Second Century BCE, was fascinated on witnessing the funeral of an eminent member of the community. A number of actors were involved in the occasion, all wearing wax masks of the ancestors of the deceased. According to a long-standing custom, only the aristocracy was entitled to possess such likenesses of their ancestors. These were death masks made in wax directly from faces of the deceased (imagines maiorum), then stored in special cabinets in the atrium of a domus.
Considered a genre distinctive of Roman art, the development of the portrait was a complex phenomenon in which the images of rulers, philosophers and statesmen of the Greek and Hellenistic worlds were fruitfully absorbed into local tradition, whilst grappling with the challenge of representing both an individual’s physiognomy and personality.
Roman society became much more fluid in the final century of the Republic, and the demand for individual portraits increased. Within the uniform system of values that now characterised Roman Italy, it was customary for the local ruling classes – and for the increasingly rich and powerful members of the freedmen class of former slaves – to display their likenesses as a means of underlining their newly-acquired status as Roman citizens. This took place in public areas as well as in their homes and on their tombs, as in Ostia, Luna (Luni), Aquileia and in Rome itself.
In the case of Elea/Velia, on the other hand, we find evidence that as late as the First Century BCE there was still a proud awareness of the city’s Greek heritage, with likenesses of the philosopher Parmenides (born around 520 BCE) and of members of the Eleatic school of philosophy he founded. Displayed alongside likenesses of the imperial family, they stand as a powerful example of the enduring cultural plurality of the peninsula even after it had become a consolidated political unit.